Facebook Inc to cut off unpaid promotional posts from News Feed

Facebook Inc. has just announced that it will block all the unpaid promotional activities from News Feed of users. The new change will push marketers and promoters to “buy an ad” to reach-out prospective consumers and no promotion would be free of cost. This news has come-out as a shocker for social media marketers as they have to pay more for promoting the content on Facebook. Since Facebook has a high price on the stock market now, it is not scared of putting down the social media marketers and big companies too.

The company in a recent announcement had also stated that it planned to spend billions of dollars on projects that might never generate any profits.

The announcement stated that commencing from January on, it would keep a tab on the number of posts, which are being made from the page of a ‘brand’, thus also reducing the number of posts per day. “It’s a clear message to brands: If you want to sound like an advertiser, buy an ad,” said Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group, who was briefed ahead of the announcement.

The user base of 1.35 billion cannot be accessed free of cost anymore. Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president who oversees marketing of ad products said, “The latest changes were not motivated by a desire to increase ad revenue but to make Facebook users happier, which helps everyone, including advertisers. Facebook surveyed several hundred thousand users, who complained that they were seeing too many junky promotional posts in their news feeds. While some of those annoying promotions were paid ads, about two-thirds were posts from brand pages, so Facebook decided to downgrade their chances of bubbling up in the news feed.”

Even for the bigger companies with sponsored pages, the posts, which are not been paid for, will be very conveniently dropped off the newsfeed of consumers. The companies will have no other option but to pay up for all posts, so that they are spread out amongst the global audience.